Aboard the Democracy Train (29 page)

Benazir went on to write a letter to CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer through her lawyer, Mark Siegel. In it, she complained about
the poor security situation and wrote that in the event that she was assassinated, she would hold Musharraf responsible.

“I have named three people, and more, in that letter to Gen. Musharraf. I have named certain people with a view to the attack that took place yesterday so that if I was assassinated, [it is they] who should be investigated.”

Asif Zardari subsequently passed on the contents of the letter to the United Nations and asked that they investigate his wife’s murder.

While the terror attack against Benazir was underway, Baz Mohammed Kakar – a key aide to Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry – visited the Aga Khan hospital in Karachi, where he heard the sounds of the explosion.

The bustling Baz Mohammed – whose cell phone constantly rings – had been newly released from house arrest. As president of Balochistan Bar Association, he had mobilized lawyers around the chief justice who had made history by defying a ruling general.

At the hospital Baz Mohammed’s ears were keyed to Benazir’s procession, particularly because her emissaries had contacted him to secure a meeting with the chief justice.

But as the lawyer from Balochistan heard the bombs go off and news filtered in that hundreds of PPP workers in Benazir’s procession had been killed, he wondered if that meant that the meeting would be put off.

Still, the bomb blast at Karsaz, which brought Benazir the certainty she could be killed any day, did not stop her in her mission. Instead, two days later, Benazir’s emissary Farooq Naik met Baz Mohammed, where the Balochi lawyer had the opportunity to see the seven-point agreement negotiated between Benazir and Musharraf.

In that note, Musharraf reportedly wrote that if the duo shared power after the 2008 elections in Pakistan, Chief Justice Iftikhar
Chaudhry would have to be dismissed in the new arrangement. Benazir had rebutted Musharraf with the words, “I disagree.”

But Baz Mohammed – who led the rallies to restore the chief justice after Musharraf dismissed him for “insubordination” – said Benazir was merely “point scoring.” Still, he arranged for the chief justice to meet Benazir’s emissary, Farooq Naik, where the two discussed the judiciary’s role in a future PPP government.

Benazir clearly planned for difficult times ahead. In her second tenure as prime minister, she had been irked by the independence of the judiciary. At the time, she had clashed with her own appointed chief justice Sajjad Ali Shah after he refused to endorse her choices of judges to the Punjab High Court and instead laid down the principle for their appointments.

PML (N) chief, Mian Nawaz Sharif proved to be even less tolerant of an independent judiciary and in 1997 sponsored the storming of the supreme court when it was poised to give a verdict against him. But in 1999, Sharif was ousted in a military coup by Gen. Musharraf and forced to go into exile in Saudi Arabia. With both Sharif and Chaudhry falling victim to Gen. Musharraf’s autocratic behavior, the ousted prime minister would use his clout to help reinstate the ousted chief justice.

For the newly-returned Benazir, it had become essential to square off with a chief justice who had become a folk hero in Pakistan. Even PPP’s former law minister from the Punjab, Aitzaz Ahsan – who had in 1986 watched Benazir take his city of Lahore by storm – had in her absence aligned himself with the defiant chief justice. Not only did Aitzaz drive the ousted chief justice to massive public rallies because – as political commentator I. A. Rehman wrote – “he liked driving,” but because he sought to bridge the espoused ideals of the PPP and an increasingly independent judiciary.

Anxious to show that she too considered the chief justice a hero, Benazir appeared to temporarily forget that she had returned to Pakistan through a quid pro quo deal with Musharraf. Instead, as Musharraf ousted Chaudhry for a second time in November 2007, she led a group of human rights activists to demand that he be released from house arrest.

The world saw Benazir stand outside the residence of the chief justice, where she bellowed into a megaphone, “He is our chief justice,” and asked for bar cutters to cut through the barbed wires.

But an e-mail sent by Benazir to PPP loyalist Taj Haider only six days before her murder showed she remained privately skeptical of Chaudhry. In it, she wrote “Judges are highly politicized and need to be judged in light of their judgments.”

Baz Mohammed said that when Benazir came to Quetta, she told him that once the PPP government came to power they would “restore all the judges except the chief justice.” He says she was most concerned about the Supreme Court’s ruling against the NRO, which threatened to reopen corruption cases against the PPP government.

Anticipating that the NRO would become the Achilles heel for the PPP government, in July 2007 Bhutto had secretly worked with President Gen. Musharraf to remove the wealth of her family and Zardari’s close friends from Swiss banks. “There was pressure on her to do so from Zardari’s “friends,” who lived overseas and now form part of his government,” sources close to her told me.

“Not so fast,” said officials of the US government, who deployed their National Security Agency (NSA) – tucked away behind clumps of trees along the Baltimore Washington parkway – to wire tap phone conversations between Benazir and her son Bilawal. In them, she was alleged to have spoken to Bilawal about the family’s secret bank accounts before she embarked on the dangerous trip to Pakistan.

Despite Benazir’s best efforts, the reinstatement of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Iftikhar Chaudhry and his revocation of the NRO would come back to haunt the PPP government long after she was gone.

To understand why the chief justice from Balochistan was considered a hero at the time of Benazir’s return, it is essential to put his actions in context. In a nation where supreme court judges have endorsed military regimes, Iftikhar Chaudhry’s refusal to
resign on President Gen. Musharraf’s orders was unprecedented. Moreover, the Baloch insurgency had peaked when he summoned the intelligence agencies to produce persons “disappeared” by the military.

It was in Balochistan, whose capital, Quetta is nestled by hilly ranges lightly dusted with snow in winter, that the chief justice’s ruling against disappearances received the widest acclaim. Balochistan has an undulating terrain of grey hills, which stretch seamlessly northwest into the Taliban insurgent areas of Qandahar and Helmand in Afghanistan. To the west of Quetta, the desert plateau meets the Taftan-Zahidan border – where the operations by the Sunni Baloch Jundallah against Iran’s predominantly Shia population have created a new tension between Pakistan and Iran.

The convergence of “cross border intelligence agencies,” in Balochistan has turned it into a hub of conspiracies and made governance from Islamabad an even more daunting task.

After 9/11, the Musharraf administration’s alliance with the US in the ‘War on Terror,’ allowed the army to clamp down on a simmering Baloch insurgency with the type of secrecy they used to hunt down Al Qaeda militants. While the Afghan Taliban was left free to operate in Balochistan, the administration made Baloch secessionists disappear under the smokescreen of combating terrorists.

Fuelling Balochistan’s insurgency was the fact that its disarming barren exterior hides rich deposits of minerals, coal and natural gas, which make a significant contribution to the nation’s energy needs. Islamabad’s failure to pay royalties and subsidies to Balochistan and its tight fisted control of the provincial government has fanned the tribal and secessionist movement, which reached a new pitch under Musharraf.

In 2005, when tribal leaders Nawab Akbar Bugti and Khair Baksh Marri mounted an insurgency against Musharraf, the army hunted down and killed their tribal fighters in the mountainous strong holds of Dera Bugti and Kohlu districts. In turn, the militant tribesmen ambushed and killed constabulary from the Frontier Corp, blew up gas pipelines and sabotaged train supplies to the province.

As rocket attacks accelerated, the Musharraf government set up a new military base and camps for army officers along the Sui gas field. The military and Baloch militant nationalists now engaged in a full scale war, backed by missiles and propaganda from both sides. From the government side, the District Coordination Officer Dera Bugti Abdus Samad Lasi told me that the tribal leaders like Nawab Akbar Bugti were responsible for keeping their people poor and backward, even as they used their tribesmen to fight their wars.

Enter a young woman doctor from Karachi, Dr Shazia Khalid, who then worked in Pakistan Petroleum Ltd, which manages the gas fields in Balochistan. Living alone at the company’s onsite hospital, she was woken one night in January 2005 and reportedly raped at gunpoint by an army officer. Despite company directives to stay quiet, she testified against the offending captain.

Shazia’s testimony to the media sent a match through the smoldering Bugti insurgency. Baloch insurgents intensified their attacks on army personnel and blew up gas pipelines, severing gas supply to the rest of the country.

Hustled into exile into London, Shazia spoke to me from her new location. Gen. Musharraf had rejected insinuations that
any
army man could be involved. However, annoyed by the negative publicity, Pakistan’s officials had arranged for her to go abroad. As she awaited an immigration visa for Canada, Musharraf added insult to her injury with his remark, quoted in the
Washington Post
in September 2005: “If you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.”

The remark, obviously intended for a victim of rape, hurt the young woman. “It has made me lose hope of receiving any justice in Pakistan,” Shazia told me in a voice muted with pain.

From his hiding place in Dera Bugti, the former governor of Balochistan and tribal chieftan, Nawab Akbar Bugti was livid that Shazia had been raped by an army man – and that he was being protected by the military president. In a voice that shook with anger, he told me that Baloch tribesmen would not rest until Shazia’s rapist was brought to trial. Without waiting to differentiate, he declared, “You in the West may take rape lightly
but we in Balochistan consider it a grave human rights violation of women.”

On August 27, 2006, the army used satellite telephones to trace Bugti to an elaborate complex of caves he inhabited in Dera Bugti, where he was killed in a massive army operation.

In the US, where President Musharraf had managed to blur the lines between the terrorism launched by the Taliban and the insurgency by Baloch nationalists, Bugti’s murder was lumped with Pakistan’s ongoing war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The day after Nawab Akbar Bugti was murdered, an influential US newspaper cited Bugti’s murder as the death of a “terrorist.”

For a while Musharraf’s operation against the Baloch nationalists broke the back of the insurgency. But in death, Bugti became a martyr. It rekindled memories of Balochistan’s forced annexation to Pakistan and further provoked Baloch militants to seek arms and money from other countries in order to secede from the federation.

Around the time of the operation against Bugti, intelligence agencies secretly picked up secessionist leaders, locked them in 4×4 ft prisons without sunlight and tortured them in order to force them to “confess” their links with India and Afghanistan and foreign intelligence agencies. Baloch activists were picked up, blindfolded and thrown from a detention center across Balochistan’s hot desert plateau – with their whereabouts kept secret from their families.

Balochistan Republican Party (BRP) leader Mir Wadood Raisani’s mother has, for 14 years, campaigned against the intermittent detention and interrogation of her son. When I met her, Raisani was still missing. His nephew Nisar Ahmed – a young man with a proud demeanor – was angry with the run around given to the family. His spirit exemplified the new generation: “We are not going to beg them to release my uncle. We will keep on fighting until we get Balochistan liberated from Pakistan.”

Around this time, Sindhi nationalist Asif Baladi was also kidnapped by military intelligence officials and questioned about his “Indian connections.” Baladi was taken to Quetta, Balochistan where he saw hundreds of missing Baloch youth whose families had given them up for dead.

Figure 12
Protest rally against enforced disappearances of nationalist leaders of Sindh and Balochistan, taken in Hyderabad, Sindh on July 1, 2007 (
Dawn
photo).

Another activist from Baladi’s
Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz
, Dr Safdar Sarki, was also abducted by intelligence officials from his Karachi residence when he visited Pakistan in 2005. Sarki, a US citizen, was blindfolded and kept in detention centers whose locations he guessed at by their temperature or by the accents of his interrogators. Although US officials questioned his disappearance, military authorities in Pakistan shrugged off knowledge of his whereabouts.